"Loser pays" also gives large corporations carte blanche to screw individuals.
Yes you are undoubtedly correct. Case in point: when my wife and I sued Paypal, and the judge threw it out based on jurisdiction and on our supposedly having given up our right to sue in under any circumstances by signing Paypal's user agreement. It cost us less than $100 to file the suit. Had we had to pay for Paypal's lawyer, that would have prevented us from suing. And this wasn't a frivolous lawsuit - even that judge agreed that Paypal had clearly stolen our money, and their lawyer didn't dispute that either.
In theory a case like this one should have been a criminal case rather than civil, but there isn't always someone interested in prosecuting, even when a crime has clearly been committed. (Another anecdotal example, though not involving a corporation: my grandfather died of a head injury under very strange circumstances, and the DMV agreed that the person who wound up with most of his assets had forged the title on his sports car. But my grandmother was unable to get a criminal case opened, even for a crime of that severity.)
When the perpetrator is a corporation that can afford gazillion dollar lawyers, loser pays protects the corporation even when they are clearly guilty.
I think classification is a big reason for the apparent increase in autism and Asperger's syndrome. Years ago a person could just be a little weird, now its always a medical condition. And even severely autistic people might not be classified as autistic, even if they were locked away and drugged because of it.
That said, I'm not questioning that it really is increasing also. Our environment has been changing rapidly. And childhood has changed a lot.
While watching a presentation by a Google engineering exec a few months ago, I got the impression that selling information about Google users was at the core of Google's strategic vision. Maybe I was extrapolating too far from limited data. I'm cautiously favorable about Google as a company, and "don't be evil" is just the mindset that's needed for a company that has that much power. But nearly every institution, cultlike, has the denial of its worst evil built into its expressed ideology. Microsoft is all about innovation, authoritarian governments all call themselves "democratic republics", etc. Google seems to have the potential to go either way.
Yes I realize that the main discussion is about Yahoo, but I think Google is more important, since they're a better company.
Maybe I should clarify by saying that the information that was being discussed was statistical in nature, not information on specific individuals.
While watching a presentation by a Google engineering exec a few months ago, I got the impression that selling information about Google users was at the core of Google's strategic vision. Maybe I was extrapolating too far from limited data. I'm cautiously favorable about Google as a company, and "don't be evil" is just the mindset that's needed for a company that has that much power. But nearly every institution, cultlike, has the denial of its worst evil built into its expressed ideology. Microsoft is all about innovation, authoritarian governments all call themselves "democratic republics", etc. Google seems to have the potential to go either way.
Yes I realize that the main discussion is about Yahoo, but I think Google is more important, since they're a better company.
Right. I was considering the laws as part of the system. My point wasn't that the laws don't need changed, but that its not a choice between completely legalizing child porn vs. this kind of insanity.
If the police and prosecutors cared about justice, then this sort of story wouldn't happen. So just the fact that they say you should call the police shows that you're probably screwed if you do. At least if you call police like them.
I don't see censorship of child porn as even being the issue here. This is like someone getting 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen. The solution isn't to legalize theft, its to try to do something about the corruption of the 'justice' system.
This is true. Though there's a tendency for communities to try to control the minds of their members, and a person will often prefer to work alone than yield to that.
Any person who seriously seeks knowledge soon acquires the tools to be a sociopath, and there's a lot of subtle ways to go off the tracks with that. I think its a self correcting problem in the sense that a person's failings tend to produce conditions that prevent them from acquiring more knowledge. But it does contribute to social fragmentation. Also, the idea areas that are natural for different people to explore aren't always compatible.
Math graduate school helped me with rigor, and the abstraction changed the kinds of thoughts I was capable of. Actually just seeing those changes was of value in itself. I still tend to leap to extreme conclusions from very limited data, but consider this to be an asset as well as a failing.
I will check out your reading suggestion when I get a chance.
The excuse of preventing children from being harmed does not justify the bullshit cases you mentioned, and in my view the bullshit needs to be opposed, strongly.
The 'slippery slope' argument could be applied against any law. But we still need laws, even though the ones we have are so often stupid, and stupidly enforced. Its a never ending battle.
Maybe in the end its a judgment call, and different people will draw lines in different places. I consider no line at all to be an extreme position, and an immoral one. And I don't think its prohibitively hard to draw a line somewhere between political speech and distributing pictures of child rape. If you don't think the rape image example is characteristic of the more common problem, then allow it to be censored and draw the line somewhere else.
I meant the academic anecdote as an example of a larger and pervasive pattern of experience. Of course everything is a mixed bag, there is much good in the study of Philosophy, and its nice that other people are doing it. I could have gotten through all the suffocating pedantry and gotten a Philosophy PhD had I wanted one bad enough, but it wasn't worth it for me personally.
I didn't mean that it only took me a few weeks to study Plato. I said that I had finished a few weeks previously, meaning that it wasn't something I'd done a decade earlier and forgotten. Having said that, I'm sure its true that I don't understand Plato in the same way that academics do however, and also that there is real depth there that I have missed.
On the flip side, many, many times I have read something that I found deep and personally useful, then was taught what it supposedly meant to the person who wrote it, and found that version to be presumptuous and not half as valuable. For example, everyone treats the story of four legged androgenous humans getting chopped in half by an angry god as a joke. And no doubt it was a lighthearted story. But there's a significant truth in the metaphor also, a very valuable one to me. What was Plato's understanding? Knowing that would have some utility of course, but in the final analysis, I don't really care. If he understood something that he can teach me, fine. If he was more like a 'poet' in being a pipe that insight flows through without understanding it in every sense that another person can understand it, that's OK too.
I'm 40, not as old as you, apparently, but old enough to see something of how much the world has changed. So I hear something of what you are saying. As it happens, I have devoted my life to philosophical knowledge, I've just done it in a way that fits my quirks, strengths, and weaknesses better than formal study would have.
When you say, "Frankly, it would be difficult to do one without the other", you are in fact advocating the protection of distribution of pictures of child rape. Its disingenuous to avoid the issue by calling the plain statement of your position 'inflammatory'. If you're not bothered much by child rape, then you shouldn't be offended by being accused of protecting it. If you are bothered by it, then you can find a way to distinguish it from teenage romance.
Unless of course you're only bothered by people speaking plainly of abuse, because the reality of it doesn't enter your personal space. In which case this would exhibit the kind of spoiled frivolity that twostix accused you of.
It would be like saying that the distribution of all films of staged murders should be allowed, because not all snuff films are real, then saying its unfair to insinuate that murder is being protected. That trick can be played with any law at all.
As a side note, whenever someone starts a statement with "frankly", I always wonder at the implied hesitation at being up front about ones position. As if deviating from a pattern of habitual dishonesty needs to be prefaced with an apology.
Pedophiles do blatantly post on slashdot. I apologize if I've lumped you in with them unfairly.
If what you're opposed to is the misuse of pornography laws to prosecute teenage lovers, and are not merely using it as an excuse to protect the distribution of pictures of 40 year olds having sex with 4 year olds, then I'm in agreement completely.
Of course, this guy was involved in relatively legit adult porn, but I feel the sentiment bears repeating:
Larry Flynt: [I]f the first amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you . . . 'cause I'm the worst.
Erring *way too far* on the side of caution? Likely. However, I think of the statistician's battle between Type I and Type II errors in many many issues relating to legislation.
You left out the children who are being molested for public viewing. It's not protecting them.
Well said. I find the lack of decency expressed by the 'child porn market = free speech' crowd to be staggering. As if the opportunity to sadistically destroy children, or leer from a safe distance while other people do it for you, is a human right.
Your mistake is to think these things are simple, or in any way obvious or easy. Leaving aside the question what "really there" might mean, you do realize that inferences can be mistaken, right?....If you find this disturbing, you should take some philosophy classes.
I gave an example in the same post of how an inference can be mistaken, in relation to sound, so yes, of course I realize that.
Ironically, your inference about my understanding based on my brief and perhaps poorly chosen words seems to have missed the mark also.
If I sounded condescending in my reply that wasn't my intent. I didn't mean to dismiss the hand example as simple. What I meant was to affirm that there is something of an objective reality, sort of, even though the senses can be fooled and our models are inadequate. Some people throw the idea of objectivity out entirely as soon as they realize their senses are limited, and imagine that everything they experience is an arbitrary reflection of personal will. I assumed your thoughts on this were considerably deeper than that, and I meant to express agreement.
I tried taking a philosophy course once. The text was a complete collection of Plato's dialogues, which I had already read carefully and in its entirety a few weeks earlier. The professor wouldn't let me take the course unless I took an introductory course in logic, nothwithstanding my several years of experience writing computer programs and mathematical proofs.
This sort of characterizes my experience of Philosophy as a field. I respect the knowledge that people gain by its study, and the intelligence that inspires it. But I'm disappointed by the condenscending ignorance that attempts to measure a person's mind by what hoops they have jumped through, what formally recognized position they hold, what vocabulary they use, and what recognized works they make reference to. Language is important, and so is rigor, and history, but not to the point where it begins to squeeze out insight. More could be learned, and shared, but pride gets in the way.
I'm not trying to hang any of that on you by the way. I'm just saying it would be a mistake to make assumptions about what I do and do not know when you haven't seen of more than a sliver of my thought on the subject.
I first realized it when thinking about 4 dimensions, and realizing how limited my everyday experience of 3 was.
I think it can seem like a big deal when you first experience some of the implications, but its not relevant to most people.
It seems a part of my mind, mostly subconscious, works in a space different from the somewhat kludged 3-D spatial model that I navigate around in. On rare occasions I've seen a glimmer, a slice from an unfamiliar angle that shows relationships that I don't normally notice.
Of course the hand is really there, even though this is only inferred from seeing the palm. What other kinds of things are real that we can infer with some reliability but can not see directly?
It seems most of us naturally and habitually think of the world we experience as being the real world, rather than an internally generated cartoon model of it. As you point out, recognizing the cartoon as a cartoon can be unsettling at first. Notice that we experience sounds as having locations, rather than as volumes of waves in the air, but our method of assigning location to a possible point of origin is problematic. It seems to me that most of us experience our thoughts as being in our heads mostly because our heads are midway between our ears, and only coincidentally because our brains are also in our heads.
But the upside of recognizing the model as a model, is then you have a better chance of recognizing other things about the world that haven't been in your sense model. For example I'm pretty sure that our 3-D model isn't the only way to think about space, even though its a natural and very good first order approximation, and the one that we all consciously use for the most part.
The surface of a sphere, which is what would see even if you could see all sides at once, is two dimensional. Of course the sphere itself, which is inferred from the surface, is three dimensional But you do not attempt to form a mental image of anything except the surface.
Of course I am blowing off the separate question of how fundamental our 3-D model of space is, since it is also is a projection or simplification of something more subtle.
I should have been clearer about what I meant in the first place.
No matter how many eyes you have, or where they are placed, you still see only surfaces. That's two dimensions, even though the two dimensions are embedded in three dimensions. I should have made that point without being dismissive of other people's use of the term 3-D.
A person's spatial sense approximates three dimensions, and having two eyes, and especially movement of the head, gives an awareness of where things seem to be in that space. The actual visual content is still two dimensional though.
I had missed a lot of interesting aspects of the 4D Julia/Mandelbrot combo when it was discovered, since computers were so much slower. I wrote my first Mandelbrot program on a Kaypro in high school. Used to run it over night just to get a 100x100 or so image, with low iterations.
The Mandelbrot set has those hairlike strands coming off of it, particularly at high resolution near pi radians. Nearby Julia set fragments, so to speak, all connect through those strands. Since the strand is between 1 and 2 dimensional in the Mandelbrot plane (having infinite arc length within a finite area, the strand within the 4-D coordinates is less than 4-D. So you could almost see something interesting in 3-D there. (Projected to 2-D of course. People who say they see 3-D crack me up, since the back of the eye is a 2-D surface.)
By the way, I particularly like the logarithmic spirals.
and 'Microsoft did that', I think some people forget how big the company is. Yes, the top brass are ultimately and formally responsible for everything the company does, and they set the tone. But its not like its possible for everything that any peon decides to do can get reviewed by a single central authority. This applies, for example, to stupid patents.
The same principle applies to stupid things done by any national government.
Slashdot Mirror
"Loser pays" also gives large corporations carte blanche to screw individuals.
Yes you are undoubtedly correct. Case in point: when my wife and I sued Paypal, and the judge threw it out based on jurisdiction and on our supposedly having given up our right to sue in under any circumstances by signing Paypal's user agreement. It cost us less than $100 to file the suit. Had we had to pay for Paypal's lawyer, that would have prevented us from suing. And this wasn't a frivolous lawsuit - even that judge agreed that Paypal had clearly stolen our money, and their lawyer didn't dispute that either.
In theory a case like this one should have been a criminal case rather than civil, but there isn't always someone interested in prosecuting, even when a crime has clearly been committed. (Another anecdotal example, though not involving a corporation: my grandfather died of a head injury under very strange circumstances, and the DMV agreed that the person who wound up with most of his assets had forged the title on his sports car. But my grandmother was unable to get a criminal case opened, even for a crime of that severity.)
When the perpetrator is a corporation that can afford gazillion dollar lawyers, loser pays protects the corporation even when they are clearly guilty.
Or maybe a better way to say that is a lot more autistic people used to unfairly be considered unintelligent.
Of course, calling someone retarded is far more impolite now than calling them autistic. Makes it a lot harder to say what the real trends are.
I think classification is a big reason for the apparent increase in autism and Asperger's syndrome. Years ago a person could just be a little weird, now its always a medical condition. And even severely autistic people might not be classified as autistic, even if they were locked away and drugged because of it.
That said, I'm not questioning that it really is increasing also. Our environment has been changing rapidly. And childhood has changed a lot.
They own the future.
Right, though selling information about users, rather than just selling the attention of users, is a pretty big difference in my opinion.
While watching a presentation by a Google engineering exec a few months ago, I got the impression that selling information about Google users was at the core of Google's strategic vision. Maybe I was extrapolating too far from limited data. I'm cautiously favorable about Google as a company, and "don't be evil" is just the mindset that's needed for a company that has that much power. But nearly every institution, cultlike, has the denial of its worst evil built into its expressed ideology. Microsoft is all about innovation, authoritarian governments all call themselves "democratic republics", etc. Google seems to have the potential to go either way.
Yes I realize that the main discussion is about Yahoo, but I think Google is more important, since they're a better company.
Maybe I should clarify by saying that the information that was being discussed was statistical in nature, not information on specific individuals.
While watching a presentation by a Google engineering exec a few months ago, I got the impression that selling information about Google users was at the core of Google's strategic vision. Maybe I was extrapolating too far from limited data. I'm cautiously favorable about Google as a company, and "don't be evil" is just the mindset that's needed for a company that has that much power. But nearly every institution, cultlike, has the denial of its worst evil built into its expressed ideology. Microsoft is all about innovation, authoritarian governments all call themselves "democratic republics", etc. Google seems to have the potential to go either way.
Yes I realize that the main discussion is about Yahoo, but I think Google is more important, since they're a better company.
Right. I was considering the laws as part of the system. My point wasn't that the laws don't need changed, but that its not a choice between completely legalizing child porn vs. this kind of insanity.
If the police and prosecutors cared about justice, then this sort of story wouldn't happen. So just the fact that they say you should call the police shows that you're probably screwed if you do. At least if you call police like them.
I don't see censorship of child porn as even being the issue here. This is like someone getting 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen. The solution isn't to legalize theft, its to try to do something about the corruption of the 'justice' system.
One needs an intellectual community.
This is true. Though there's a tendency for communities to try to control the minds of their members, and a person will often prefer to work alone than yield to that.
Any person who seriously seeks knowledge soon acquires the tools to be a sociopath, and there's a lot of subtle ways to go off the tracks with that. I think its a self correcting problem in the sense that a person's failings tend to produce conditions that prevent them from acquiring more knowledge. But it does contribute to social fragmentation. Also, the idea areas that are natural for different people to explore aren't always compatible.
Math graduate school helped me with rigor, and the abstraction changed the kinds of thoughts I was capable of. Actually just seeing those changes was of value in itself. I still tend to leap to extreme conclusions from very limited data, but consider this to be an asset as well as a failing.
I will check out your reading suggestion when I get a chance.
The excuse of preventing children from being harmed does not justify the bullshit cases you mentioned, and in my view the bullshit needs to be opposed, strongly.
The 'slippery slope' argument could be applied against any law. But we still need laws, even though the ones we have are so often stupid, and stupidly enforced. Its a never ending battle.
Maybe in the end its a judgment call, and different people will draw lines in different places. I consider no line at all to be an extreme position, and an immoral one. And I don't think its prohibitively hard to draw a line somewhere between political speech and distributing pictures of child rape. If you don't think the rape image example is characteristic of the more common problem, then allow it to be censored and draw the line somewhere else.
Regards.
I said that I had finished a few weeks previously, meaning that it wasn't something I'd done a decade earlier and forgotten.
Whoops, I see that's not what I said. Your point remains valid in either case.
Fair enough.
I meant the academic anecdote as an example of a larger and pervasive pattern of experience. Of course everything is a mixed bag, there is much good in the study of Philosophy, and its nice that other people are doing it. I could have gotten through all the suffocating pedantry and gotten a Philosophy PhD had I wanted one bad enough, but it wasn't worth it for me personally.
I didn't mean that it only took me a few weeks to study Plato. I said that I had finished a few weeks previously, meaning that it wasn't something I'd done a decade earlier and forgotten. Having said that, I'm sure its true that I don't understand Plato in the same way that academics do however, and also that there is real depth there that I have missed.
On the flip side, many, many times I have read something that I found deep and personally useful, then was taught what it supposedly meant to the person who wrote it, and found that version to be presumptuous and not half as valuable. For example, everyone treats the story of four legged androgenous humans getting chopped in half by an angry god as a joke. And no doubt it was a lighthearted story. But there's a significant truth in the metaphor also, a very valuable one to me. What was Plato's understanding? Knowing that would have some utility of course, but in the final analysis, I don't really care. If he understood something that he can teach me, fine. If he was more like a 'poet' in being a pipe that insight flows through without understanding it in every sense that another person can understand it, that's OK too.
I'm 40, not as old as you, apparently, but old enough to see something of how much the world has changed. So I hear something of what you are saying. As it happens, I have devoted my life to philosophical knowledge, I've just done it in a way that fits my quirks, strengths, and weaknesses better than formal study would have.
When you say, "Frankly, it would be difficult to do one without the other", you are in fact advocating the protection of distribution of pictures of child rape. Its disingenuous to avoid the issue by calling the plain statement of your position 'inflammatory'. If you're not bothered much by child rape, then you shouldn't be offended by being accused of protecting it. If you are bothered by it, then you can find a way to distinguish it from teenage romance.
Unless of course you're only bothered by people speaking plainly of abuse, because the reality of it doesn't enter your personal space. In which case this would exhibit the kind of spoiled frivolity that twostix accused you of.
It would be like saying that the distribution of all films of staged murders should be allowed, because not all snuff films are real, then saying its unfair to insinuate that murder is being protected. That trick can be played with any law at all.
As a side note, whenever someone starts a statement with "frankly", I always wonder at the implied hesitation at being up front about ones position. As if deviating from a pattern of habitual dishonesty needs to be prefaced with an apology.
Pedophiles do blatantly post on slashdot. I apologize if I've lumped you in with them unfairly.
If what you're opposed to is the misuse of pornography laws to prosecute teenage lovers, and are not merely using it as an excuse to protect the distribution of pictures of 40 year olds having sex with 4 year olds, then I'm in agreement completely.
Of course, this guy was involved in relatively legit adult porn, but I feel the sentiment bears repeating:
Larry Flynt:
[I]f the first amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you . . . 'cause I'm the worst.
Erring *way too far* on the side of caution? Likely.
However, I think of the statistician's battle between Type I and Type II errors in many many issues relating to legislation.
You left out the children who are being molested for public viewing. It's not protecting them.
Well said. I find the lack of decency expressed by the 'child porn market = free speech' crowd to be staggering. As if the opportunity to sadistically destroy children, or leer from a safe distance while other people do it for you, is a human right.
Your mistake is to think these things are simple, or in any way obvious or easy. Leaving aside the question what "really there" might mean, you do realize that inferences can be mistaken, right?....If you find this disturbing, you should take some philosophy classes.
I gave an example in the same post of how an inference can be mistaken, in relation to sound, so yes, of course I realize that.
Ironically, your inference about my understanding based on my brief and perhaps poorly chosen words seems to have missed the mark also.
If I sounded condescending in my reply that wasn't my intent. I didn't mean to dismiss the hand example as simple. What I meant was to affirm that there is something of an objective reality, sort of, even though the senses can be fooled and our models are inadequate. Some people throw the idea of objectivity out entirely as soon as they realize their senses are limited, and imagine that everything they experience is an arbitrary reflection of personal will. I assumed your thoughts on this were considerably deeper than that, and I meant to express agreement.
I tried taking a philosophy course once. The text was a complete collection of Plato's dialogues, which I had already read carefully and in its entirety a few weeks earlier. The professor wouldn't let me take the course unless I took an introductory course in logic, nothwithstanding my several years of experience writing computer programs and mathematical proofs.
This sort of characterizes my experience of Philosophy as a field. I respect the knowledge that people gain by its study, and the intelligence that inspires it. But I'm disappointed by the condenscending ignorance that attempts to measure a person's mind by what hoops they have jumped through, what formally recognized position they hold, what vocabulary they use, and what recognized works they make reference to. Language is important, and so is rigor, and history, but not to the point where it begins to squeeze out insight. More could be learned, and shared, but pride gets in the way.
I'm not trying to hang any of that on you by the way. I'm just saying it would be a mistake to make assumptions about what I do and do not know when you haven't seen of more than a sliver of my thought on the subject.
I first realized it when thinking about 4 dimensions, and realizing how limited my everyday experience of 3 was.
I think it can seem like a big deal when you first experience some of the implications, but its not relevant to most people.
It seems a part of my mind, mostly subconscious, works in a space different from the somewhat kludged 3-D spatial model that I navigate around in. On rare occasions I've seen a glimmer, a slice from an unfamiliar angle that shows relationships that I don't normally notice.
Of course the hand is really there, even though this is only inferred from seeing the palm. What other kinds of things are real that we can infer with some reliability but can not see directly?
It seems most of us naturally and habitually think of the world we experience as being the real world, rather than an internally generated cartoon model of it. As you point out, recognizing the cartoon as a cartoon can be unsettling at first. Notice that we experience sounds as having locations, rather than as volumes of waves in the air, but our method of assigning location to a possible point of origin is problematic. It seems to me that most of us experience our thoughts as being in our heads mostly because our heads are midway between our ears, and only coincidentally because our brains are also in our heads.
But the upside of recognizing the model as a model, is then you have a better chance of recognizing other things about the world that haven't been in your sense model. For example I'm pretty sure that our 3-D model isn't the only way to think about space, even though its a natural and very good first order approximation, and the one that we all consciously use for the most part.
The surface of a sphere, which is what would see even if you could see all sides at once, is two dimensional. Of course the sphere itself, which is inferred from the surface, is three dimensional But you do not attempt to form a mental image of anything except the surface.
Of course I am blowing off the separate question of how fundamental our 3-D model of space is, since it is also is a projection or simplification of something more subtle.
I should have been clearer about what I meant in the first place.
No matter how many eyes you have, or where they are placed, you still see only surfaces. That's two dimensions, even though the two dimensions are embedded in three dimensions. I should have made that point without being dismissive of other people's use of the term 3-D.
A person's spatial sense approximates three dimensions, and having two eyes, and especially movement of the head, gives an awareness of where things seem to be in that space. The actual visual content is still two dimensional though.
I had missed a lot of interesting aspects of the 4D Julia/Mandelbrot combo when it was discovered, since computers were so much slower. I wrote my first Mandelbrot program on a Kaypro in high school. Used to run it over night just to get a 100x100 or so image, with low iterations.
The Mandelbrot set has those hairlike strands coming off of it, particularly at high resolution near pi radians. Nearby Julia set fragments, so to speak, all connect through those strands. Since the strand is between 1 and 2 dimensional in the Mandelbrot plane (having infinite arc length within a finite area, the strand within the 4-D coordinates is less than 4-D. So you could almost see something interesting in 3-D there. (Projected to 2-D of course. People who say they see 3-D crack me up, since the back of the eye is a 2-D surface.)
By the way, I particularly like the logarithmic spirals.
and 'Microsoft did that', I think some people forget how big the company is. Yes, the top brass are ultimately and formally responsible for everything the company does, and they set the tone. But its not like its possible for everything that any peon decides to do can get reviewed by a single central authority. This applies, for example, to stupid patents.
The same principle applies to stupid things done by any national government.